As communication technologies further advance, serial interfaces has been widely employed in communication protocols such as Ethernet, PCI Express and/or the like. As a result, serial interfaces have been widely used to convert signals between parallel bus-connected devices and high-speed serial communication systems. In order to enable the movement of a large amount of data between parallel and serial systems, a serializer/deserializer is employed to convert data from a parallel data form to a serial data form in the high-speed serial communication systems.
The serial communication system in its simplest form may comprise a transmitter, a communication channel and a receiver. The transmitter may receive a parallel set of bits and convert them into serial signals through suitable digital circuits such as multiplexers, shift registers and/or the like. The serial signals are transmitted over the communication channel to the receiver.
The receiver may comprise a clock and data recovery circuit, which is capable of extracting a clock signal from the received serial signals. The recovered clock is used to accurately sample the received data.
The receiver may further comprise an injection-locked oscillator for generating multiple clock phases from a single input phase. The multiple clock phases may be used to sample and track a variety of received data signals in the serial communication system.